BRATTLEBORO — Sense and Nonsense, the sixth in the SOLOs series of performances filmed on the Hooker-Dunham stage, airs Friday, March 19, at 7:30 p.m., and will simultaneously stream on YouTube and BCTV.
The showing will be followed by an online public after- party with the cast of the co-production between the Hooker-Dunham Theater and the Rock River Players.
Sense and Nonsense consists of a series of monologues that take aim at the destructive nonsense of gender stereotypes.
• Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald's “Aphra Behn: A Woman of Ideas” celebrates Women's History Month by introducing audiences to this powerful 17th-century playwright, poet, and translator who was denied her rightful place in literary history because she was a woman. Jessica Gelter will direct the segment.
• Anneli Curnock challenges gender roles in a different way. In “The Creature Speaks,” Curnock performs the scene in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein when the creature confronts Dr. Frankenstein demanding that he create another creature to end the torture of being totally shunned and alone.
• In “Elinor,” written and directed by Michael Nethercott, Cassandra Holloway portrays Elinor, a stoic wartime nurse who felt she had to hold in her feelings to be able to care for severely injured soldiers. Elinor finds herself, many years later, overwhelmed by emotion.
Ian Hefele looks at a different aspect of the damaging nature of sexual stereotypes. In a piece written by playwright Sadie Portman, Hefele's character struggles with trying to maintain his sanity living “24/7” with his husband and their children. He rails about those who treat him as their “token gay friend” and those who demand to know which of his children's two fathers is their mother.
• Jenny Holan gives provides lighter interludes with the whimsical nonsense of Lewis Carroll's poetry.
Coming up next in SOLOs is Episode 7, Originals. Bahman Mahdavi, producer, describes it as “our most ambitious undertaking yet, with all original material and enhanced production values.”
Episode 8, to be aired in May, will be produced by RRP's artistic director, Annie Landenberger.